Washington State has two Democratic senators and at least a couple of Congressional representatives who give the lie to the canard that the Democratic Party is no different from the Republican Party, and from my observations, I'm pretty sure that my state is not unique in that.

Senator Patty Murray (D) delivered an impassioned speech to Congress on the eve of the vote to give Bush discretionary war powers, arguing strongly against it. And she has been a severe critic of the Bush administration all along. She has earned herself the epithet "Taliban Patty" from Right-Wing media commentators because of her unequivocal position. Senator Maria Cantwell (D) disappointed me when she voted in favor of giving Bush war powers, but since then she has changed her position, and among other things, has managed to stymie the Bush administration's efforts to give free rein to oil and timber companies to exploit the few remaining wilderness areas. She's the junior senator from Washington State, and there's hope for her yet. Long-term Democratic Congressional Representative from Washington's Seventh District, Jim McDermott, has been a very loud critic of the Iraq war since well before the war started, and is a royal pain in the ass to the Bush administration on several issues. He has an admirable progressive voting record, as does the younger Jay Inslee, also from Washington State.

I think if one were to run through a list of the Democratic senators and representatives for most states (without even going through the list myself, a few names pop into mind:   Reps. Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, and Sen. Robert Byrd), one can readily see that when people write off the Democratic Party as merely an echo of the Republicans, they simply do not have the facts. I spend a fair amount of time watching C-SPAN, so I can actually see and hear what these folks are saying and doing rather than just listening to some news commentator's idea of what they're about, and I make special note of the super at the bottom of the screen so I know who they are, where they're from, and which party they belong to. It becomes patently clear that, in the Democratic Party, for every Joe Liebermann for example, you have several Russ Feingolds.

When people say there is no difference between the two parties, it reveals the unfortunate fact that those actually believe this statement are not part of the informed electorate that Thomas Jefferson said would be necessary if democracy is to survive in this country.

Don Firth